Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking Quotes
"There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archeological digs."
"Dolomite can turn into calcite only over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of years."
"God or man, he embodies all the radiant energy of the adolescence of western art."
"In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months."
"Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."
"The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves."
"The task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."
"You can learn as much—or more—from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face."
"Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes."
"Patients don't file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them."
"The overwhelming number of people who suffer an injury due to the negligence of a doctor never file a malpractice suit at all."
"Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human."
"We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation."
"The difference between 55.6 and 42.6 percent can be the difference between passing and failing."
"The machinery of our unconscious thinking is forever hidden."
"Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door."
"We make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us."
"Our attitudes toward things like race or gender operate on two levels."
"Our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values."
"If you're going to treat people equally, you have to work hard at it."
"Improvisation isn't random and chaotic at all."
"If you can create the right framework, all of a sudden, engaging in the kind of fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue that makes for good improv theater becomes a lot easier."
"You've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening."
"The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control."
"Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition."
"Recognizing someone's face is a classic example of unconscious cognition. We don't have to think about it."
"Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out."
"The danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake."
"We all have an instinctive memory for faces. But by forcing you to verbalize that memory—to explain yourself—I separate you from those instincts."
"There are certain kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal kinds of experience that are vulnerable to this process."
"You could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You're preventing them from resolving the situation."
"Why not do the same thing with political ads? Or speeches? Or arguments about the issues? And after each statement, ask them again whom they're going to vote for. Then you can see which arguments move how many voters and which voters they move."
"Here was a tool he could use, a process that could reduce the mysterious ways of politics to scientific testing and evaluation."
"Everyone wants to capture the mysterious and powerful reactions we have to the world around us."
"But the truth is that it isn't, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven't always been sensitive to this fact."
"But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying."
"In order to make sense of people's cola judgments, we need to first decide which of those two reactions most interests us."
"The product is the package and the product combined."
"People say peaches taste better when they come in a glass jar."
"The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious."
"The most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation."
"The face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion."
"Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with."
"This kind of smile does not obey the will. Its absence unmasks the false friend."
"When someone is autistic, he or she is, in the words of the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, 'mind-blind.'"
"Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings."
"We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression."
"In a critical sense, the police officers whom Klinger describes performed better because their senses narrowed: that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat directly in front of them."
"After 145, bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down. Doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult."
"At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing. The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain reaches up and hijacks the forebrain."
"You might as well try to argue with your dog."
"In an extraordinary number of cases, people who are being fired upon void their bowels because at the heightened level of threat represented by a heart rate of 175 and above, the body considers that kind of physiological control a nonessential activity."
"The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as hard as possible—to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the event of injury."
"Everyone should practice dialing 911 for this very reason."
"You must rehearse it, because only if you have rehearsed it will it be there."
"It's almost like a runner's high. It's a very euphoric kind of thing."
"A dog in the hunt doesn't stop to scratch its fleas."
"But they ignored him. Why? Because they didn't hear him. They had shut down."
"It's still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn't have been anywhere near the car."
"The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart."